Once upon a time, people thought that it would be fun to have a place to learn and play and talk together, and the more people that came, the better they would all learn from each other. So they got together and built this place in one fixed spot. And they DID learn from each other, and it was fun and amazing. But some people were greedy and wanted to control all of it so that they could feel like they were better than everyone else. These greedy people forced the people to give them more and more money to be able to use the spot. The bad guys would treat the people who wanted to have fun badly, and use information about them against them. This made people sad.
Then one day, somebody said, "Hey, why can't we just have a bunch of little spots, so that nobody can hold us hostage?"
But the other people were afraid they wouldn't be able to play with some of their friends or learn from other people if everybody was separated. Until some people came up with the idea that all these small communities could agree to share everything they were doing with each other, small spot to small spot. Nobody owned all the spots now, and people were free to choose spots that were more convenient for them, without having to be afraid that others wouldn't be there, because all the small spots still made one big spot!
And that dear, is basically the fediverse in a nutshell. Now go to sleep, you have a big day tomorrow. tuck tuck
I mean, this is Explain Like I'm Five. I feel the goal would be to dumb it down as much as possible and I feel that this is a very good, if somewhat cheeky, way of explaining the very very basics of the Fediverse.
Is this missing a lot of nuance? Of course. But everyone having a bunch of different spots that can't be held to some "bad guy's" standards while all those spots are still able to share and talk to each other, is a very good way to explain to someone who has no understanding of instances and servers and especially if you needed to explain it to a 5 year old.
Thanks, exactly. If somebody had just said "Explain it to me" it would have been a much different explanation. But "explain like I'm FIVE"... well, I explained it in ways a five year old would relate to. Experience: Parent whose children used to be smol.
ELI5: when electricity moves, it creates an area around it that pushes on things nearby, and that makes those things move. Some things are more sensitive to that electric force than others, which is called magnetism. It's an invisible force though, just like how you can't see gravity. When something that is magnetic is near electricity, they react to each other and that causes things to move, or glow, or heat up, and other stuff.
Beyond 5:
Most people have electricity explained using the water analogy. That is that electrons flowing through a wire are analogous to water flowing through a pipe. More conductive or larger wires are like having a bigger pipe. More flow equals more electricity, which equals more power.
This isn't quite right. The flow of electrons doesn't create any power. The flow of charged particles creates electromagnetic fields. These fields result in a physical force on objects that are responsive to those fields. Think of it like gravity. Gravitational fields affect matter with mass, and electromagnetic fields affect matter through an inherent magnetic quality. So, the electrons don't actually push on anything, they create an electromagnetic field, and that creates a physical force.
This is a great answer, thank you! The water analogy always felt incomplete to me in highschool.
So how do light bulbs work? I've always thought that the electrons bump into atoms of the tungsten, and the "friction" heats the filament enough to generate light. Since tungsten isn't magnetic, I wouldn't think that it would interact with the electric fields produced, but does it?
This is correct. The water analogy has limitations that are exposed when you start to talk about transmission over longer distances or very small things like computation circuits. Having said that, humans have a hard time understanding this explanation because we don't have senses that even remotely describe electric fields.
Someone else will probably explain this in a much better way, but I'll give it a go. I'll explain DC, AC is a bit more complex.
Current is the flow of charge. Atoms are made up of a nucleus, surrounded by electrons. The electrons are loosely held, meaning they can travel around to other atoms.
In simple terms, batteries have an accumulation of atoms with extra electrons which are lost more easily, meaning the electrons want to move away. This is known as electric potential. Since there is a lack of electrons (aka positive charge) in the opposite terminal of the battery, the electrons move from the negative to the positive terminal, or we say the positive charge moves from the positive to the negative terminal, through the circuit.
Metals are known to let charge flow within them, so they are used as conducting wires in circuits. When electrons flow through the circuit, the energy with which they flow can be harnessed. Example, if we add a resistance to their path which glows, you have a bulb.
Motors work in a different way. When current flows through a circuit, it has a magnetic effect on its surroundings, so it can interact with magnets. This is harnessed to make rotational motion. It helps if you watch videos, as the visual representation is infinitely better.
I am also still learning, so if anyone finds any mistakes whatsoever, please do let me know. I intentionally didn't use the falling water analogy, as that didn't help me at all when I was learning this topic.
Imagine you're holding each end of a rope that is looped around a pulley. When you pull on the rope with one hand, your other hand goes in the opposite direction and the pulley turns a little bit. You've transfered a little bit of work to the pulley, which can be used to do other things. But "you" have only moved a little bit. You pull your stretched hand in, and you other hand goes out and the pulley does a little more work. Now do this movement 60 times a second (50 in some parts of the world), and you've just discovered alternating current electricity. You don't have to move much in order to send energy over long distances, which is one of the advantages of AC over DC.
So in an AC current the electrons are just jiggling back and forth? How far do they move through a wire, I'd imagine they jump like a few meters back and forth if it's only 50/60 times per second.
It's not really the electrons moving. It's the electromagnetic field potential that's moving. The rope is that field. And the distance it moves isn't measured in meters, but in volts. In most cases, around 240 volts (more or less...but that's a whole other discussion).
A lot of this is hard to wrap your head around because you can't physically see these forces, only measure them with instruments. We'll dive a little deeper while still trying to keep the rope metaphor going.
Imagine each electron in a wire as stationary, and all standing in a line next to each other all the way down the wire, each connected to its neighbour by a loop of rope. If you turn one of these electrons, it causes the one beside it to turn, which causes its neighbour to turn, etc all the way down. Our pulley is attached to one of these electrons. You pull the rope one way, it turns the pulley, which turns the first electron, which transfers that energy all the way down the line. How far you pull in one draw is the voltage. How hard you pull is the amperage.
This is the basis of a generator. A magnet (our pulley) is passed over a coil of wire, which induces an electromagnetic field (our rope) in the wire. It makes the electrons "turn", and sends that energy down the entire length of the wire. Nothing really moves except for the electromagnetic field.
To add to this, imagine that pulley on the end is connected to another pulley through a few gears. When it spins one way, it turns the last pulley one way. When it spins the other, it meshes with another gear to turn the last pulley the same way.
You've converted AC current into DC current, which you can use to drive a motor in one direction. This gearing is usually done via a series of diodes.
I could visualize your description of this, but ONLY because I recalled this great little Steve Mould video where he talks about a really neat toy called Spintronics. It teaches electricity through the analogy of gears, ratchets, and pulleys of a "mechanical circuit."
What stops a battery from just equalizing its own charge internally? By which I mean, why do the electrons have to go all the way around the circuit to get to the negative terminal?
Batteries have an insulated separator between the positive and negative sides. They design the battery with a particular maximum voltage in mind, so they engineer it with a separator that is always a higher resistance. Thus the electrons will only be able to make the jump when a circuit with lower resistance is formed.
AI doesn't really exist yet. Media, back in 1870, called Tesla's magnetically controlled boat artificial intelligence, and again in the 80s when computer scientists invented the game of life. But even now nothing we've made so far can do decision making. ChatGPT, the smartest out there, is really just a versatile prediction engine.
Imagine if I said, "once upon a" and asked you to come up with the next word, you'd say, "time" as you've heard that phrase hundreds of times. I then asked you to come up with the next word, and the next you might start telling me about a princess locked in a tall tower protected by a dragon. These are all stereotypical elements of a "once upon a time" story. Nothing creative, just typical. Chat GPT has just read way more than you or I ever could and is really good at knowing more stereotypical stories and mixing them together. There is no "what is best for humanity" only "once upon a time..."-made up stories.
What your saying doesn't exist is an Artificial General Intelligence, something approaching the conscious human mind. Your right that doesn't exist.
AI doesn't just mean that though.
What we're dealing with right now is the computer equivalent of growing mouse brain cells in a petre dish, plugging them into inputs and outputs & getting them to do useful things for us.
The way you describe chat GPT not being creative, is also theoretically how our own brains work in the creative processes. If you study story structure & mythology you'd find that ALL successful stories boil down to a very minimalist set of archetypes & types of conflict.
What your saying doesn’t exist is an Artificial General Intelligence
While technically true, when people colloquially say AI, they basically mean AGI. This distinction just confuses people. The OP and normal people asking about AI generally just mean AGI.
Unfortunately, people label ChatGPT etc as “AI” because it’s technically true, but it’s basically the reason why confusion like this post exist.
What we're dealing with is randomly choosing options from a weighted distribution. The only thing intelligent about that is what you've chosen as the data set to generate that distribution.
And that intelligence lies outside of the machine.
There's really no need to buy into tech bros delusions of grandeur about this stuff.
Right now, you go to a url, which has a server behind it. Your browser says, “I’d like the site!”. The server gives you the site, and your browser shows you the site and runs it for you. When you run the site, you may actually make modifications to the site in your browser, blocking ads, doing some custom stuff with extensions, etc.
Now, Google is essentially bringing something into their browser that allows servers to block any modifications to the site as you run it. And servers may automatically block any browsers that don’t support that feature. Basically, servers will be able to ensure that you run the app in the exact way they intend, without modification
A bit clearer now. But to my knowledge, Google does not ‘own’ the internet, it is just popular as a search engine, browser, emails+personal information.
What if the common man decides to another browser, say chrome or edge, and search engine such as duckduckgo or bing, how will Google’s proposed changes affect such use cases?
Most browsers use Chromium as the basis of how it works and these are how we access the internet’s websites. Chromium was invented by Google and both browsers you mentioned run on Chromium.
It’s not that Google controls the internet, but the vehicle (your browser) you use kind of does. And most of the vehicles are built using the code from the company that wants to impose this.
I want to add Ladybird as one option for a new browser. It’s still in its early days, but is under active development. I hope that one day it’ll be in such a shape that it could be used as a daily driver. It’s Open Source and built from scratch. It’s awesome to follow the development of such a big project!
At this point in time, since it’s under heavy development, I wouldn’t use it as a daily driver. I hope some day it will have enough features to compete with all the other browsers. I just wanted to bring Ladybird up so it gets some visibility in the world.
It’s an open source browser, continuously being worked on, started from scratch, so it’ll be a while before there are enough support for all the websites in the world. Even the JavaScript engine is built from scratch, which makes this project really exciting IMHO.
As I mentioned it’s still in it’s early days. They’re working on the standards and support for all CSS properties and JS at the same time. Some pages aren’t working correctly yet, but things are moving forward every day. Don’t know if someone will work on an Android version, it’s open source after all. Currently it’s working on SerenityOS and Linux.
I just wanted to voice out that there are alternatives in the works, that has nothing to do with Google or the other big tech companies.
Oh, and why is bad: the server requires your browser to pass a check to see if it’s going to run your code correctly (called an attestation). It asks a third party to do that check, which will most likely be Google. Guess which browsers are going to pass those attestations more easily? Chrome. The only possible benefit to the average person is that maybe this will make it more difficult for bot farms to access the web
Is what you are describing similar to the experience of declining cookies on certain sites, and in turn, sites dont allow you to enter and redirect you to Google or a main page?
It depends, on standard consumer units, it's just like putting a plastic ice cube tray into the freezer, once it's frozen the ice drops down a chute to break it into individual cubes.
For commercial versions (where more volume is needed), they will build up layers by misting a low temp tray with water. That way it has less mass to bring down to the freezing point at a time.
AI currently doesn't "understand" or "know" anything. It's trained on a collection of text, and then predicts and extends the text prompt you give it. It's very good at doing this. If someone "creates something new" the trained AI will have no concept of it, unless you train a new ai model that includes text about that thing.
Oh wow it is really interesting that new things will be unknown! So basically AI still isn't intelligence because it can't really make choices on its own, just based on what it has learned.
well it can "make choices" in the sense of having it predict a decision that someone might make. but it's not really thinking about things on it's own trying to figure it out, it's just extending the text.
For example, say you ask it: "should we ban abortion?" now, it's not actually thinking on it's own, so it'll go "what's the most likely response to this?" and give that. But if you go: "respond as a pro-life republican, should we ban abortion" the same ai model will respond "yes", but if you then go "respond as a pro-choice democrat, should we ban abortion" and it'll respond "no".
Basically it's not thinking at all, but rather just extending the text you give it (which would include a response to the question). We can try prompting it as some all knowing being, but it'll just inherently have biases depending on the exact nature of the prompting, as well as the dataset. It's not reasoning things out on it's own.
So if you ask it something it doesn't know, it'll just spit out garbage. You could try explaining the new thing in your prompt, at which point it'd respond the most likely text which may or may not be a good answer. In practice a new model would just be trained with the included topic, and it'd be the same as before: your prompt would determine the output of the ai.
Basically, it's not deciding things; it's just giving you the most likely continuation of the text. and in that sense, you can completely control the type of answers it gives. if you want the ai to be a flat earther who thinks murder is right, you can do that.
That is really interesting, thanks for the extended explanation! And yeah I have come across many times the bot being stuck and just spitting lies to have an answer hahaha
The example you give is also a big concern with how modern AI is very susceptible to leading questions. It's very easy to get the answer you want by leading it on. That makes it a potential misinformation machine.
Adversarial testing can help reduce this, but it's an uphill battle to train an AI faster than people get mislead by it.
We already have a misinformation problem. large trusted sources like academia, wikipedia, msm, blatantly push misinformation. so I doubt any attempts by big corporations to "align it" will resolve the issue. it becomes a question of "who decides what is true?"
It’s not even making decisions. It’s following instructions.
Chat gpt’s instructions are very advanced, but the decisions have already been made. It follows the prompt and it’s reference material to provide the most common response.
It’s like a kid building a Lego kit- the kid isn’t deciding where pieces go, just following instructions.
Similarly, between the prompt, the training and the very careful instructions in how to train, and instructions that limit objectionable responses…. All it’s doing is following instructions already defined.
Excellent, thank you! I’m wondering if something was lost in translation or my interpretation. When I think “context,” I consider something along the lines of: “Water is good.”
Is it good for a person drowning? What if it’s contaminated? What about during a hurricane/typhoon? And so forth.
Now lets really break your brain, are you & I able to make our own choices? Is the ego, the voice in our own skulls, the conscious mind really ever making any decisions?
There are a great many studies that seem to indicate decisions are made well before our conscious selves are aware of them.
We are far more driven by emotion & instinct then any of us care to admit.
This is a really good talk that outlines some possible criteria for intelligence and demonstrates how close chat GPT is or isn't on those different ones
It was never fine. There have been anti-abortionists demonstrating outside Planned Parenthood offices for decades. Planned Parenthood personnel have been harassed, assaulted, and murdered for decades. What changed was that the right, seeking a way to desperately maintain any relevance in a quickly liberalising political environment made deals to fight for the same people who we'd've labelled terrorists and criminals. At this same time a dumb ass named Bill Clinton removed the regulations that kept corporations from owning huge swathes of television stations. In addition, Murdoch started Fox News which was born with the only reason to be a propaganda arm of the conservatives. Oh, and then there was the rise of the radio talk show propagandists like Rush Limbaugh, may he suffer eternally in hell. All these worked together to push a more and more extremist conservatism on the masses. They made it seem okay to be hateful and spiteful and mean. They pushed the idea that intelligent people could not be trusted(unless they were conservative and they towed the conservative line). They pushed the idea that empathy was a weakness and that the only person you should care about was yourself.
It didn't suddenly change, it has always been like this. The problem is the masses on the left tend towards being self absorbed dumbasses blind to what was going on around them - especially the white ones. The white ones thought everything was just fine and dandy because it was for them and they had that one black friend so they totally weren't a racist. And racism was dead because of that, too. The Democrat Party has, for decades, been a disjointed mess led by people who are only vaguely competent to lead a room of kindergartners. There is one saying I've known for decades - "The Democratic Party is the only one who can snatch defeat from the jaws of victory." In addition, hubris on the part of Ruth Bader Ginsberg kept her from retiring when Obama had a majority of Democrats in the Senate. So instead she wound up giving her seat to Trump to fill.
There are so many more things I could list, but won't because I don't want to spend all night going over what you'd get in a polisci course about the last 50 years of American politics. There is, however, one last thing I'll touch on - that every time the Democrats have had a control of the Presidency and Congress, or even a veto proof majority, they never, ever took the time to legalize abortion. Consider that for a moment. This whole mess could have been avoided had the Democrats had the fortitude to do the right thing. They never did. They played just as much a game with women's bodily autonomy as the GOP did. There's no side that is innocent in this mess. I am not "both sides"-ing here. They're both responsible for it in different ways - the Democrats because they valued their seats more than women's autonomy and wrongly banked on RvW always being there and the Republicans who actively sought(and still seek in many states) to destroy women's bodily autonomy not because they believe in it, but because it gets them votes.
Back in the 90s, I worked at a car dealer. There was a doctor in town who provided abortion services. He drove a VW Jetta. (Or was it a Passat?) We sold several windshields to that doctor.
In 1995, 1/4 of Americans started to lose their minds because TV had girls kissing girls, black people, and Mexicans. 6 years later, something bad happened, another 8% of Americans lost their minds, and turned to White Prosperity Jesus, conspiracy theories, and ultra nationalism to salve their weary souls.
Then a black guy got elected president. This, combined with 20 years or growing income inequality drove another 8-10% berserk.
In response, they found the closest thing they could find to White Prosperity Jesus, Creepy Orange Prosperity Uncle, and banded behind him, in a quivering hope that he'd send all the funny looking colored and gay people someplace far away like Mexico, the capital of Africa or something, so that good uneducated people who work 20 hours a week could afford a 4-bedroom house and a Camaro, like it was when their grandpa was growing up.
This is called Anti-aliasing. It is to make images on screen appear smoother than is normally possible.
I may be incorrect on this part, but I think that the colors (instead of greyscale) is part of the subpixel sampling , which is a more advanced version of anti-aliasing…
The fridge is connected to your water supply. It fills a mold/ice tray with water, the mold can come in many shapes and forms, it could look just like an ice tray. There is a sensor at the mold that detects when it's full and then closes the valve so the water doesn't overflow. That mold gets cooled down to freezing. Then move the ice from the mold to the storage bin. Once the storage bin is full it will stop the ice-making process. If the bin isn't full it will make more ice.
The cooling works the same way as your fridge/freezer. You have a liquid (refrigerant) that evaporates at a relatively low temperature at low pressure. Any evaporation process draws out heat. That's why sweating cools us down and why water feels cool even if it's the same temperature as air. Then you just build the system in a way that the evaporating gas is in a place where it will draw out the heat from the freezer. Then you send that now cold low-pressure gas through a compressor that turns it into a hot high-pressure gas. You slowly cool that gas down, once it gets cold enough it will turn liquid again. Then you send the liquid through an expansion valve to reduce the pressure and you are starting at the top again with a low-pressure liquid that evaporates and sucks out the heat from your freezer. Some fridge models will have a single cooling system for the fridge, freezer, and ice maker. While some other models have a separate cooling system for the freezer and fridge compartment. And you need a mix of high-pressure and low-pressure areas to ensure the evaporation process is always happening in the area where you want to cool down.
The sensors used in the ice maker are usually a mix of physical ones and temperature ones. The ice storage bin often just has a lever near the top that ice will push down once it's stacked high enough. So once you take out some ice, it will drop lower and the lever is released. But a thermometer near the top of the bin can also work. As the ice stacks higher the temperature near the top gets colder. And eventually, the thermometer will detect the temperature it's set to deactivate the ice-making process. The tray usually uses a temperature-based sensor to detect when the water is frozen.
Moving the ice from the tray/mold to the storage bin works in a lot of different ways. Often, the tray will briefly heat up so the ice isn't stuck to it, and then use gravity or some kind of motor to move the ice from the tray to the storage bin.
Friends A bring their toys to your house to play. Other friends B play with them as well. You, the entitled CEO and owner of the house, tells friends B they now have to pay YOU for playing with Friends A toys because it's YOUR house. Friends B and A get upset and say they'll go elsewhere. You, don't think they will.
reddit is about to start charging money to use their api. this will mean some 3rd party apps that are used by moderators will start being charged millions per year, which is unaffordable and thus will end up closing. so moderators are protesting this change by making the subreddits go private.
so they have hundreds of thousands of moderators that work for free on reddit, and now they also want to charge them to make reddit better? this is unreal
It's more the amount rather than that they are charging at all. The timeframe is preditory, and the cost is about 100x similar api cost, and at least 20x what they'd be losing by not having those users on the app.
High volume API tools are also helpful for auto mods and community bots which is especially annoying for mods. Also, modding on mobile is only really possible though third party apps.
Do 5 year olds have email? Because it's kind of like that. You have an email address "someone@gmail.com" and you can send a message to "person2@hotmail.com". You don't both have to be on Gmail.
Well fediverse apps are kind of like this. Imagine lots of little reddits with their own communities and user bases.
You are your_name_here@kbin.social. You can talk to otherguy@lemmy.ml. Same goes for magazines/communities (subreddits). If you want to join a magazine on another server, you can do that like @technology (notice the leading @ symbol which tells Kbin that it's a magazine and not a user).
This is what is most important for the average user to understand about the fediverse. There is a ton more than this like interoperability with different apps that aren't thread based like Kbin and Lemmy like Mastodon but that's a different discussion.
@JonEFive@s804 really? Kbin uses @ to identify it's a magazine, when every other platform on the 'verse (GNU Social, Friendica, Lemmy, etc.) uses ! to identify that its a group?
Ok, I had to play with this a bit to try to see what's going on because I have seen the ! notation elsewhere as well. It looks like if I type !community@instance ( !technology ) it creates a link automatically but it takes me to /m/!community instead of just /m/community. If I use @community@instance ( @technology ) it takes me to /m/community. Interestingly though, the @ notation looks like it also works for users but also has the odd problem of including the @ symbol in the link when the address isn't expecting it @jonefive@kbin.social ( @jonefive ) takes me to /u/@jonefive but it should be /u/jonefive
@JonEFive@s804 I know Mastodon doesn't recognize the !. Using the @ will let you comment on posts from a community you are following, (and all posts to the community show as if the community "user" re-tooted them all in your feed), but posting original posts from Mastodon doesn't work well. It used to not work at all, since Mastodon implemented the ActivityPubl implementation for Title "wrong" (a title from another instance shows as a Content warning on Mastodon, and posting a Content warning on mastodon doesn't show like a title anywhere unless they have software specifically designed to recognize its from mastodon and handle it differently) I know there had been a lemmy change to specifically use the first line of a toot from mastodon to @communityname@instan.ce as a title to a new post, but I have only seen it ever look like garbage. Even though Mastodon is by far the most popular platfrom on the 'verse its really the least feature rich. Even the granddaddy of them all (GNU Social) has more features, though the code isn't regularly maintained (v3 being released feels like "when Covid is over" level of never).
Wondering if this has something to do with why kbin isn’t federating properly with some groups. That and the case sensitivity thing. !3d_printing does not work on kbin.social no matter how I try to search or format the url.
@s804@JonEFive my understanding is #Kbin is the new kid on the block, with lots of promise, one of the reasons i created a different kbin.social account weeks ago. My understanding is that original implementation had been done only in Polish from within Poland and is just now reaching the rest of the world.
I don't necessarily have the best understanding either, but I'll give it a shot.
The fediverse is a federated universe, which means lots of servers can talk to each other (like a federation of people) instead of all being centralized in one company and their servers. It's like how email is a common way to talk to each other, even though there are different groups with different versions.
Lemmy is the Reddit like portion of the fediverse. There are other parts, such as Mastodon, which is like Twitter. These can talk to each other a bit too, but right now they mostly talk within themselves.
Servers like vbin, sh.itjust.works, Lemmy world, Lemmy.ml, and many others are computers that store the information on Lemmy. They keep track of how many upvotes, text, links, and sometimes content hosting. But because there are a lot of them, and anyone can easily make their own, it's harder for a company like Reddit to just ruin it all for profit.
@JohnDClay@s804 as with so many things, Wikipedia is a great place to start. It can be over whelming to wrap your head around, until you realize oh #ItWorksLikeEmail
Lemmy is the Reddit like portion of the fediverse.
Don't forget about #kbin which has both "reddit subs like" functions (magazines) and "twitter like" functions (microblogs). And all are linked to lemmy and mastondon instances, or whatever else in the fediverse.
ELI5
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